App Store Earnings For Developers Exceed $70 Billion; App Downloads Up 70% YoY (macstories.net)

Apple announced today that since it launched in 2008, developers have earned over $70 billion from the App Store. From an article: "People everywhere love apps and our customers are downloading them in record numbers," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "Seventy billion dollars earned by developers is simply mind-blowing." According to Apple's press release, subscriptions saw a 58 percent increase year over year, fueled by their availability in all 25 app categories. Games and Entertainment are the App Store's top grossing categories, Lifestyle and Health and Fitness apps have experienced 70 percent growth, and the Photo and Video category is up over 90 percent.

Comments

This is why Blackberry lost the smartphone wars

[mykepredko]

When I was at RIM, the iPhone 4 came out with one of the benefits for buyers was the extensive library of apps that were available for download. The iPhone SDK was free or a very nominal cost. To develop an app for the Blackberry at the time required an expensive SDK as well as a costly testing process to make sure the app met their standards.

RIM at the time (and I talked about this with very senior executives) made it clear that the way Apple was doing would destroy Apple as professionals wouldn't want something which had unvetted and, to their eye, silly apps.

Re:This is why Blackberry lost the smartphone wars

[Gilgaron]

Interesting observation. They may have even been right for the professionals of the time, but the mass market is what won things for Apple.

Re:This is why Blackberry lost the smartphone wars

[tlhIngan]

When I was at RIM, the iPhone 4 came out with one of the benefits for buyers was the extensive library of apps that were available for download. The iPhone SDK was free or a very nominal cost. To develop an app for the Blackberry at the time required an expensive SDK as well as a costly testing process to make sure the app met their standards.

RIM at the time (and I talked about this with very senior executives) made it clear that the way Apple was doing would destroy Apple as professionals wouldn't want something which had unvetted and, to their eye, silly apps.

Actually, until the Apple App Store came out, the whole vetting process was a gong show. Apps were everywhere - every phone had a version of J2ME that could run apps and often shipped with games and such for it.

The big problem was if anyone wanted to develop an app for a phone, they had to get SDKs from the manufacturer, and then the carrier had to approve the app for a specific phone in the end. It was a gong show and only the largest companies could actually do it. (These days, those companies are much smaller now as they didn't have to jump through a million hoops to get dinky apps onto phones anymore).

Even with Apple's approval mechanism, it was still way easier to go through Apple's process and get an app up than the old way. And it worked across all of Apple's phones - there was no messing with individual phone SDKs (each phone had their own J2ME implementation, and every phone had idiosyncrasies in it) and in general it was one all very consistent development environment.

And yes, Apple did it to prevent unvetted silly apps too. Thought it was also to try to contain developers so they'd avoid doing stuff that would kill the battery, DoS the cell network or impact system security over trying to keep fart apps off the phone. (One has to admit, there's a whole category of silly/stupid apps that simply never existed... until some developers decided to get creative).

Re:Note that this is all in aggregate

[BarbaraHudson]

I'm glad you asked. It's easy to calculate what the average is for those who aren't in the top 1,000.

$70 billion 2.2 million current apps gives 31k per app per 9 years. say 3.5 k per year. Now you have to deduct for apps that used to be in the store but are no more, so let's be generous and say the rate of attrition is 50% over the last 9 years (it's probably much higher). That means the average app makes $1.75 k per year.

So let's be nice again, and say that the top 1,000 apps take 90% of the revenue (it's probably much more). That leaves the 4.4 million apps (we have to include those that are no longer there, remember?) to split $7 billion over 9 years, or $1,509 each over 9 years, which works out to $176 a year.

So, how many apps does the average app developer have to crank out to make $10 an hour ($20,800 per year) for a 40 hour week (260 days, no 2 weeks holiday for YOU!) You would need to crank out 118 apps in 260 working 8-hour days in a year..That's more than 2 apps a day. With no money left for overhead, income tax, etc., and no time or budget for promoting your app or support.

Most app devs are either suckers or they've got a customer who is a sucker.

And remember, this is an average. Half will be making less than $10 an hour pumping out 118 apps a year.

More spin to hide the nosedive

[lucm]

They used to say: Apple sells the most smartphones. Then it was: Apple users spend the most time per session. Then it was: Apple makes the most money per phone. Now they use app store numbers to claim success. What's next? Number of iPhones seen at Starbucks?

Re:Note that this is all in aggregate

[lucm]

Most app devs are either suckers or they've got a customer who is a sucker.

Spot on. Apple Store app devs are for the most part Apple customers. Gartner usually releases a report every year about the business of selling apps, and last year their research indicated that less than 1% of non-free apps are profitable.